John Willis: Why AI's Biggest Problem Isn't Technology

What if your AI strategy is creating more risk than progress? John Willis joins Andrew Stotz to trace how Deming's System of Profound Knowledge shaped the way he thinks about organizations, learning, and change. From his early days building DevOps to the AI transformations he's navigating with CIOs today. Along the way, John connects Deming to fast feedback loops, explains why leaders keep mistaking a learning problem for a technology problem, and shares stories that never made it into his book, Deming's Journey to Profound Knowledge.   A fresh conversation for longtime Deming thinkers and those just beginning the journey.   TRANSCRIPT

0:00:02.0 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm here with featured guest, John Willis. John, how are you doing?

 

0:00:15.7 John Willis: Great, Andrew. I was just thinking, I feel like that song, like I got my picture on the cover of Rolling Stone. Like, I'm on the Deming Institute podcast. Yay.

 

[laughter]

 

0:00:24.9 Andrew Stotz: We finally got you on.

 

0:00:27.8 John Willis: Yeah, yeah.

 

0:00:30.3 Andrew Stotz: Actually been a while and I wanna introduce you just briefly and then I'll let you do a little bit more of the introduction. But basically on Amazon, a book popped up and I was just looking at the date of that. That book popped up on, for me, it popped up on September 6, 2023 on Audible and I immediately bought it and I got the Audible book and the book's called 'Deming's Journey to Profound Knowledge. How Deming Helped Win a War, Altered the Face of Industry, and Holds the Key to Our Future'. And I immediately got it. Didn't know you, listened to it, loved it. Later you reached out on LinkedIn and we started communicating and you were kind enough to send a copy of it, which I then went through in more detail. I love the book. I really highly recommend the Audible version because it's just fun. Because the book is opening up a whole new Deming lens, a whole new way from somebody that never met Deming, and I just found that fascinating. So maybe why don't you take a moment and introduce yourself to the audience so that people know who you are, where you've been, what you've been doing and what you're doing now?

 

0:01:41.4 John Willis: Yeah, no, no, great. I... So, yeah, I... I've been doing technology, usually high consequence business, regulated industry, banks, retail, the biggest of the bigs, where the technology is incredibly important. Right? And I've been doing five decades of basic technology transformations, and I'm kind of the person who gets bored real easy. So I've literally gone through, like, you name it, mainframe, centralized computing, client server, distributed computing, priority systems, the Linux Open systems, you know, owned infrastructure cloud, and I'm consider one of the founders of the DevOps movement. And now today, like the cliché that I am, I've been doing a lot of organizationa